Short tip: ESXi 6.5, Supermicro X10SDV-TP8F and 10G NICs

When reinstalling one of my homelab vSphere cluster nodes I noticed again, that the Intel driver ixgbe is not part of the ESXi base image. This driver is needed for my Supermicro mainboard X10SDV-TP8F in order to enable 10G networking.

On the VMware download section there is an appropriate download for ESXi 6.0. Anyhow, this driver also works along with ESXi 6.5 – and in accordance with the compatibility list – it is also supported for the newer release.

So it is safe to install the driver – using esxcli, vSphere Update Manager (vUM) or the VMware Host Client.